The unveiling of the monument dedicated to Mary Mother of the Unborn caused violent reactions by the lay world in favour of abortion

3 January 1992:five days laterthe unveiling of the monument.

The whole Town Council of Aquila decided, under massive pressure by politicians and the mass media, to eliminate the inscription placed above the monument which was placed in the Cemetery where unborn babies are buried. Those “50 million babies who each year are killed by abortion” bother some people.

This decision doesn’t surprise us and doesn’t demoralize us: we have long known the vileness of man who tries to eliminate the Truth by simply erasing it. And it isn’t even an original gesture: when 2,000 years ago the Innocent one was crucified, above His cross they placed an inscription which declared the reason for condemning Him: “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews”. This inscription really annoyed His accusers who went to Pilate to have it removed or at least corrected. But Pilate, even though he wasn’t a master of coherence and courage, refused to do so.

The centuries go by. The innocent continue to be slaughtered. The inscriptions which declare the Truth continue to annoy people. Politicians keep on trying to erase them. This time Pilate has surpassed his own limits. We hope that politicians and tomorrow’s newspapers will teach us how to erase from man’s conscience the inscription “DO NOT KILL” which the Giver of Life impressed in fiery letters upon their minds.

8 January 1992:A worker sent by the Town Council, under the vigilant eyes of the deputy mayor and the councillor in charge of cemeteries, in the presence of journalists and photographers called to immortalize the Council’s “determination” – which operated in an illegal manner – carried out the sentence delivered on 3 January by using a grinder, a kind of beater, to erase the incriminated inscription which declared the Truth regarding the world: “To the 50 million babies in the world who each year are killed by abortion”. And thus those 50 million innocent children were once again “eliminated”.

Now that the Truth has been “beaten” our civic and powerful administrators (a total majority of Christian Democrats: 21 councillors out of 40) can have sweet dreams. Those 50 million “little ones” no longer have a voice, they don’t exist anymore, once again they have disappeared, and have been “beaten up” by the “powerful”.

A month after unveiling the monument, 3,000 feminists organized a “march on Aquila” to protest against the monument’s initiative. The compact demonstration was described by newspapers as “extremely non-political”, and “political banners and symbols of political parties were prohibited”…

9 March 1994

Following the TAR of Abruzzo’s (Regional Administrative Court of Law) sentence – with a brilliant appeal by lawyer Maurizio D’Armi – the lawsuit which the Armata Bianca’s Pro-Life Movement brought against the Town Authorities in order to restore the inscription of the monument dedicated to babies killed by abortion: the TAR declared that the Town Council’s resolution in which it resolved to eliminate the inscription was not valid.

The hundreds of millions of innocent children now have a voice again and the inscription: “To the 50 million babies in the world who each year are killed by abortion” was put back again. Is there anyone willing to listen to this voice, this no longer silent cry which our little brothers are shouting to us?

31 December 1994:“Armata Bianca will destroy you!”

The reprisal continues throughout the years: the monument dedicated to Mary Mother of the Unborn is profaned. The feat was claimed with the following reasons:

‘In order to strike one of the symbols of the contempt for womenAnd so that people may savour the joy of the spirit of rebellion”.

“Armata Bianca, we will destroy you!”: this was one of the programmatic writings which defaced the monument. Someone did their best to start a spate of lawsuits against the Armata Bianca and especially against its founder Father Andrea D’Ascanio. But let’s proceed in order…

continued ...

While the burial of unborn babies started to spread in all of Italy and abroad, someone advised Father Andrea not to continue the burial of babies killed by abortion, otherwise he could run into some “mishap”. “By what death will you kill me? Father Andrea answered almost joking. – “By the worst death, by moral death… You will be destroyed as a man and as a priest…”.

Father Andrea continued to bury children killed by abortion. The silence that preceded the storm lasted a few years: in 1996 a hail of 17 lawsuits began against him and the Armata Bianca, before all kinds of courts, except the military court, even though an “Army” was under accusation…

With the support of a massive media bombardment on the front pages of newspapers and national television, the Armata Bianca and its founder are accused of the most unimaginable and unlikely offences. With a calculated and systematic regularity, in every article we see the statue of the Aquila cemetery and it is highlighted that the Armata Bianca is “that” antiabortion movement which started burying babies who are victims of abortion.

Although there was a lack of evidence, the criminal trials lasted until 14 June 2006, when the court pronounced a sentence of complete and final acquittal “because the facts don’t exist—no offences were committed”.

For years the defamation regarding Father Andrea and the Armata Bianca filled entire pages of newspapers and had wide coverage in national television news reports, while the news of the acquittal was reported with little importance only by a few local newspapers. Even in this case there is “nothing new under the sun”.

It’s natural to wonder: why did a statue placed in a cemetery cause so much reaction? We can understand the answer only in a spiritual dimension, summarized in a verse of the Paschal sequence: “Life and Death in astonishing conflict strive”.

The Armata Bianca, after having evangelically resolved the case before God’s Court as well (“Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”), believes that its precise duty is to continue the battle to defend Life with new strength, which has matured in suffering, bearing witness also to the life of the souls of these little martyrs, by inviting all the faithful to invoke them in their prayers. After giving them “a margin of dignity” with their burial, it now intends to continue to bear witness to them so that they may be united to the martyrs of Bethlehem.